Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs (born 1945) is an American prankster who has organized numerous successful media pranks, hoaxes, and other presentations.

Skaggs is one of the originators of the phenomenon known as culture jamming.

Skaggs has used Kim Yung Soo, Joe Bones, Joseph Bonuso, Giuseppe Scaggioli, Dr. Joseph Gregor, and the Rev. Anthony Joseph as aliases.

In his youth, Skaggs studied at the High School of Art and Design and received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Between 1966 and 1969, Skaggs organized crucifixion performances on Easter Sundays.

In 1968, Skaggs noticed that middle-class suburbanites were going on tours of the East Village to observe hippies.

Skaggs subsequently organized a sightseeing tour for hippies to observe the suburbs of Queens.

On Christmas Day, he created the Vietnamese Christmas Nativity Burning to protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Skaggs tied a 50-foot bra to the front of the U.S. Treasury building on Wall Street in protest against Francine Gottfried's street harassment, organized a Hells Angels' wedding procession through the Lower East Side, and made a grotesque Statue of Liberty on July 4, again to protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, Skaggs bought Earlville Opera House, which is now a thriving performance and exhibition center.

In the same year, he organized what he called a Fame Exchange during the New York Avant Garde Festival, where he hired a group of admirers to follow him around instead of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

It was a forerunner for his next pranks.

According to his web site, Skaggs does not care for "vicious" pranks such as letters containing fake anthrax; he also states that he is not doing anything illegal.

He uses volunteer actors to play his customers, refusing to really scam anyone except the media.

Often the prank is launched with nothing more than a press release with a phone number; in these press releases, Skaggs leaves hints or details that easily could be checked for accuracy.

Eventually, he reveals the hoax to make his point.

On some occasions, Skaggs has sent a substitute to interviews with programs such as Entertainment Tonight and To Tell the Truth.

Producers did not notice.

Also, photographs in the National Enquirer and Playback have depicted the wrong man.

Many of Skaggs's pranks are originally reported as true in various news media.

Sometimes the stories are retracted.

When not pranking the media, Skaggs earns his living by painting, making sculptures and lecturing.

In a 2015 interview, Skaggs revealed that he has a hoax that is "out there" that no one has discovered yet.

After the interview, Chinese news agency SinoVision promptly fell for his then 30-year-old annual New York City April Fools' Day parade hoax and ran a four-minute segment in English on the non-event.

In 2017, "Art of the Prank", Andrea Marini's award-winning feature documentary about artist Joey Skaggs, was released internationally on television and streaming platforms.

In 2020, production began on a series of short oral history documentaries featuring Skaggs and materials from his archive titled, “Joey Skaggs Satire and Art Activism, 1960s to the Present and Beyond”.